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In my procrastination of trying to write up my methods section for RF2 (my next PhD barrier) I came across Jeff Bezos’s commencement speech from 2010. (Not super sure how I reached it in my click-a-thon).

But I found it to be incredibly important.

After my life got shook up when I fell sick, I had to change how I worked, how I lived to move around shitty symptoms that really brought me down. It made me question everything I was, and who I am, and where I was going. It hit me when I was on my way up in the intermediate art-world, and brought me tumbling back down to the ground, really hard – really unprepared for this new world – injured in so many different ways. Every time I looked at myself and my life, it was like looking at a mirror that had been cracked a bunch of times. I’m still not over it all.

At times, I feel more broken than I ever was, but I feel at different times and in different areas I have gained so much more. One area is in personal growth. Whilst I’m still trying and learning to be a better person (and sometimes failing,) I realized that I WANTED to REALLY be a better person. I had no idea how I was being supported years before I fell sick, and even still to this day, where I felt incredibly stupid for taking it all for granted.

Some days I literally feel like I’m dying, and with this came a fear of what would be my “legacy” (this is such a loaded and over-the-top word). But what do I want to leave behind? What do I want my work to be? We spend so much of our time at work, doing work – of all kinds – that it makes sense that we should try and enjoy and make the world a better place than what we found it in. This doesn’t have to be a grandios project – we know it often only has to be the smallest thing that can make the greatest of differences. Listening. Offering to help someone out. Introducing yourself. Donating to charity. To giving someone a helping hand up. The list is endless.

Bezos’s speech really resonated with me, and I think some of his words are good markers. Especially when the road is rough, and rocky, and risky and dark. So I hope these bits I’ve chopped up here – help you.

In 1986, Jeff Bezos graduated from Princeton with a degree in computer science. In 1994, he founded Amazon.com. He was literally selling books from his garage. In 2010, he went back to Princeton to address the graduating class about the difference between gifts and choices — a profound reflection on reconciling being smart with being kind, an illusory choice many “successful” people feel like they have to make.

Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins.

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Around 5 years ago, my life changed in a fatal kind of way. When I was in America, I was given a diagnosis that made feel like I was looking down a barrel of a gun and made me question everything in my life. This crazy plot twist, that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Tramedy, set off a bunch of things in my life. The past 4-ish years have been personally-health-awful, but yet through this difficult time this happened:

Last night I picked up my crazy amazing big prestigious award from the Houses of Commons, like some kind of rock-star. It was surreal, and I’ll probably never get another opportunity to experience something like it. But it was such an incredible evening and I met so many amazing, talented, smart, giving and generous people who work within healthcare, specifically within radiography and oncology care. We should be so proud to have these people – and people not acknowledged working day in and out within the NHS just like them – and in our country.

It’s more than anyone could ask for and it’s an absolute rare privilege; To be recognized for trying your best to help others. I’ve never really been acknowledged before, but I can’t help but feel heavy with gratitude to everyone who got me here, as thanked previously in many, many blog posts previously. Because this award is just representative of everyone who got me here. There is no greater gift than being able to be part of something bigger than yourself, trying to make things better for others. And so the honour of being part of narrative alone is incredible.

Then I got home, back to the north, anxious about the U.S.A. Elections, fell asleep and awoke to Trump president-elect.

When I fell sick, I had so much angst because I felt like there was so much left to do and so much more love to give in life. I’d cry because I felt sorry for myself. And I felt ashamed even more for behaving that way, for being weak. But then on reflection I realized that the tears flowed because they needed to. Because things were building up instead of me like a pressure cooker, and I wanted to keep moving forward.

I was crying because I wanted to live, because I was afraid of not being here. And I was afraid of being forgotten.

So having gone through that, and 2015 UK General Election and Brexist Ref vote – I figured we need a hope-of sorts – a plan of sorts. Here’s what I’ve learnt from my few years living invisibly and wanting so bad to enjoy life again. And how Brexit, and Trump and a million refugees stuck around the world make you feel powerless and everything is lost. But

Trust me when I say this time is short & this life is both terrible & beautiful.

Resentment & anger are inevitable & sometimes are important, temporarily, but it’s important to not take up residence in that place. I PROMISE you deserve better. Even if you voted Trump. You do deserve better.

I promise you there are people who will leave you in life, but that others will embrace you unconditionally in your brokenness.

So you go out & run fearlessly in the direction of love. You are never alone. Your tribe is out there. GO GET IT. And please keep laughing. Joy is salvation. In the darkest, lowest moments, being able to find something, anything to laugh about can save you.

We never stop. We never give up. We fight for each other and protect each other.

Living and giving kindness is the best revenge.

The most creative challenge of our lives is learning how to approach our own inner darkness with curiosity, empathy, and friendliness.

And that’s where it’s all going to come together.

Sometimes in life, if you are very lucky, you find the grace in having it all blow up in your face.

Our jobs for the day (life): Tell the truth; Be kind & curious; Love all people with all your heart; Don’t put up with any bullshit.

Love Is Love Is Love, we’ve had a bunch of set-back but that just means we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us but lets keep working to make things better – for ourselves and for those who are voiceless, victimised, invisible or who can’t say it for themselves. There is so much more that what unites us than what divides us.

Our work isn’t done, and we need each other and others less fortunate than us, who are REALLY struggling need us. So don’t wait to be called, because you’re already being beckoned.

It’s only been basically 3.5 weeks of being an enrolled PhD student. And what is it teaching me?

Well, I’m being schooled, once again.

I keep being met with questions of what I’ve done – and I try to justify my lack of products with: “I’ve been doing it for 3 weeks?”… but people want something more concrete, I guess.

At first people told me I should be reading, and reading lots! Getting together my bibliography. That’s what I should be doing for the first weeks they said. So my first week, I diligently sat in the library and looked up interesting books and downloaded paper after paper from the library gateway on creative methodologies and healthcarec(& spent a hefty time on twitter). Then the second week rolled around, really quickly I might just add, & other people started saying that I really should focus on the making art bit because, you know, it is a practice led PhD after all and I don’t want to get to christmas and have nothing to show for it. Too right. So I started making some really terrible pieces of parts of work/thinking process (you know, it always starts off that way, so not too worried at this stage). Then week 3 was met with that I *really* should be focusing pretty much on the REF1. which has to be submitted in literally 6 weeks now. Scary AF.

So I’ve sat and stared at my REF1 form on word for about a week now, feeling the pure weight of re-framing, of patching up the holes of my research proposal, maybe even changing it slightly, of finding out an extensive and integral and good literature list. Of finding artists to reference and draw from, of figuring out where I sit – art? design? healthcare? sociology? anthropology? (it’s obviously all of those things, but hot damn) — trying to get my head around my potential methodologies and the pitfalls that they entail, and figuring out how long everything *should* take me to create a plan of sorts, and lets not even talk about my issues of ethics – and my potential plans in place whilst I endure a long ethics procedure — all of this needs to fit into 1000 words. No joke. And I have insane imposter syndrome that it’s not even funny.

My head of studies told me I needed to take a few weeks to just play, to knock down these boundaries I’ve learnt/built up during the past few years. To reflect upon all of the things I’ve experienced, and frame them. To see the tensions that lie within the frameworks of healthcare methodologies and artistic/creative methodologies – how these paradigms work. How they oppress and close discussion or the opposite or even offer more opportunity. I wrote quite a few reflections, maybe I’ll share some on here in due time.

I applied with a proposal for my first symposium talk in London(combining art and healthcare together – more info soon) and got it, showed folks how to use drawing as a research and reflective tool at the IPE conference at SHU, and I’ve got the radiotherapy annual conference in Jan to present my other design research from earlier this year. All of which I’ve started to pull together over the past 3 weeks too.

I’ve drank a lot of tea, I’ve sat and stared at the walls in my studio. I’ve moved into my city center apartment/flat.

But mostly what all of this has taught me is that when the ground shifts, the next chapter begins. Here’s what I’ve been thinking and learning and trying to tell people when they’re super confused about why I’m using artistic practice-led work to create healthcare change.

Making things can expand one’s understanding of what it means to be human. Finding the vehicles for exploring the edges of your experiences can be really, really scary but it’s a great way of transforming thinking into practice. Change is inevitable, adaptation is optional.

Every transformation that we are witness to changes the world, and in turn, changes us.

‘Making’ is a process. In comes from ‘doing’. Doing something. ‘Making’ can bring you face to face with your own agency. ‘Making’ has some of the qualities of an echo. It can travel in space and time and come back to you in the form of a feedback loop. It helps to make something that you don’t necessarily understand. And even if you think you understand what you are making, the act of making it will change your understanding of it and you will feel yourself get bigger.

I have been exploring my own tracings, teachings, drawings, wanderings and wonderings, feelings, thinkings, questionings and assumptions ever since to better see what can happen when something opens and something else falls… out. And like all ‘critical making,’ it attempts to create a context to make tangible some of the possibilities that can drive passion and engage spirit by striving to go beyond the things we know and towards our own reckoning.

‘Critical making’ can remind us that even when we act alone—as an artist, as a designer, as a healthcare professional, or as a hermit—in isolation, we are part of a larger community.

Seeing is a reflexive process, and like an echo it can find its way back to you. Of course, it all depends upon listening. Everything depends on listening. Listening is different from hearing. Hearing can tell you which way to go. Listening can tell you who you are.

I’m having to re-learn to be diligent, and teaching myself to be better with my time, and my work. I’m practicing at staying awake and trying to be attentive to what is elusive, fantastic, contingent, different and barely there.

I said that i was going to take every single opportunity I get as a PhD student. And I’ve attended nearly 75% of everything open to me, talk wise within my free time.

I plan on paying attention to everything. And remembering what Linda Sikora said when I feel crazily over-whelmed with all of the above.

She says that, “It’s more important to keep paying attention and to follow your attention wherever it goes, than it is to think about meaning and content, because meaning and content come from paying attention to the world.”

When I fell sick, I lost a lot of time, a lot of work, a lot of living.

I was so, and still am, fatigued that I could no longer do all the 1000’s of things i used to be able to do – which felt just natural to me. I had readapt my life, and find new ways of coping and registering when things were becoming too much.

I would be lying if I said I knew my limits now, years on. Because I don’t and some weeks, after weeks of being on the grind, I find myself on my knees. My fatigue levels effect how I cope with the pain in my body that’s always ever-present. My 2 year long headache becomes literally unbearable, to the point one day a few weeks ago i literally physically had to crawl up the stairs to my house, and to my room, and my neck & head hurt so much i couldn’t move/lift it – i had to just lay in bed for 15 hours. Then I got shingles for the bazillion’th time.

These – what I call relapses – affect all the habits that I’ve put in place in my life to try and be better.

The fitness ones are always the first to go.

Then any work habits i’ve put in place to help try and ease my weekend workload. So it makes my work much slower, and if I say something could be done by Monday it works out next Monday.

Any healthy-cooking-eating habits, gone. Microwave meals or noodles take 4 minutes and I can go to sleep.

I start becoming even worse at replying emails. And i’m no longer the best like I used to be when I’m on a roll.

And it makes me feel even more like crap. Like I can’t do normal things, I can’t have a work-life balance. That I feel like I’m letting people down and can’t owe them the time they deserve. I start mourning my old life, again. Like, why can’t I go back to the pain-free no fatigue smizz? And I feel resentment and shame upon myself, like why can’t I fix myself.

This is a regular cycle.

Now, the human body/mind is amazingly resilient – and I have adapted to regain some normalcy – i’d never be able to tell you how. Just years of trial and error, of living with it (although sometimes it makes me wonder what even kind of life is this, is it even worth it). I’ve made sacrifices. But I’m glad I can still lead my life to this level and hope it’ll slowly get better.

But this doesn’t stop me wondering how I can fix myself and why I haven’t be able to so far. I feel like I’m personally failing. I feel like I’ve tried everything. From mental health, to physical, to spiritual health. And nothing works. Nothing gets rid of this fatigue. Nothing gets me closer back to my old pain-free life. Where I could multi-task, and just like, never feel tired.

I feel like a wuss talking about it, because you know – I am ALIVE. and am able to lead my life to probably about 70% on good weeks.

But when it’s never ending.

When you don’t feel like yourself.

Like when you constantly feel like you’ve got the flu.

When you’re just left here, hanging. Alone. Without anything to grab hold of – to hoist you back up. With no map. No torch to see through the darkness.

How do you get back?

Sometimes I feel down on myself. Even though I know I shouldn’t. But I do.

I wrote this post a year + ago on what it feels like to have ball-breaking fatigue. And it remains exactly the same today & i think it’s important to re-share it. Because I think fatigue is such an misunderstood thing – like no one knows how dilibertating it is, until you experience it for real.

Being freelance and working from home, I slowly turned into a sucker for cooking shows like Masterchef, The Great British Bake-Off, The Taste, Come-Dine-With me, and almost anything on the Food Network. No cooking show was too long or too low-brow and underproduced for me. I thought it was probably an age thing – I never watched this stuff when I was younger: turned out it was just a love of different foods (probs due to aging-maturity) but I think it was more to do with avoiding doing work/relaxation thing. This became clearer as a healthcare student – I watched these shows even more religiously. The MasterChef series is ALWAYS on when I’m trying to revise for exams or have 100 deadlines. Trying to avoid reality.

One day after clinical placement, my housemates and I sat down with our food to eat and watch food on the TV. This was a show about a bunch of chefs trying to make it in this Italian restaurant/bakery engrained in tradition and processes. One of the young chefs tries to take a bunch of short-cuts and the older chefs catches him – and tells him off – saying, “that’s not how we do it here! We do it the long, hard, stupid way”. Which is stuff like not using yesterdays bread, making fresh new bread instead, making the soup from scratch. ect ect.

And this really stuck with me. The Long-Hard-Stupid-Way.

I think I do everything the long, hard, stupid way. I often get told this. If there’s an easy or a hard way – you can guarantee that i’ll find the hardest way first. My mom says it’s because I don’t have any common sense.

But I started thinking about the routes I’ve taken to get where I am now. And I wonder if I could take an easier path – would i have taken it? The answer is probably no. And I started finding pleasure in reflecting upon this rough, hard-stupid-way path.

There’s a whole spectrum of – here’s the long hard stupid way – which is ultimately the way I seem to be compelled to make & do things, and then at the other end we have super efficient way over there.

When you work the long hard stupid way – it looks a lot like worrying, scratching new ideas, endless notebooks, trying to learn things you’d never dream of doing before, it’s a lot of others looking at you like you’ve got it wrong, it’s staying up late and then having to get up early the next day (killer), it’s not returning your library books on time, but all of these actions are inspired by just caring a lot.

That’s not to say you can’t be efficient and not care deeply – but i, personally, don’t know how to do that.

But behind the long-hard-stupid way is a gift. It’s a lot of heart.

It’s staying up late, and sketching out plans and learning how to code smart-phone apps (FYI – it’s not the same as making a website which I originally thought it would be. Just because you know italian doesn’t mean you’ll be able to speak french), and taking the time to make it – without ever thinking about having a plan to make it accessible. Turns out making apps is a rollercoaster.

It’s going through a really testing health-issue, that literally breaks who you are – and makes you question everything you are & your worth– and going through the system that doesn’t know what to do with you – because you’re not a child and not an old adult – and instead of being a normal person and try and change the system from the outside, you decide to re-train and try to make the difference yourself, inside the system.

It’s deciding to apply for things you’ll probably never get accepted to do – for the love of learning new things, and the process, and meeting new people – & ultimately hoping that the rejection and the attempt itself will lead to more change and things to build upon for the future.

And most of all, it’s deciding to do all of it together – at once. Long-hard-stupid-way.

Freelancing is often the long-hard-stupid-way. You’re never sure how much work you’re ever going to get. So you just say yes to pretty much everything, just on the off chance you hit a lull and therefore you’ll still have some money coming in. All the while – burning yourself out. The thing is, you always work more hours than you get paid to work. Life-work balance is hard to strike. And you can never officially take a sick day.

Working alone is hard. Being your own investor is hard (& stupid sometimes). And running all of these things together – teaching, app making, website designing, conference drawing, illustration commissioning, clinical-student-ing, academic-working – all while feeling crappy & being broke- is super long, hard & stupid – and to do it responsibly is even harder.

Learning to work your life-balances out is hardwork. And it’ll probably take you some long-hard-stupid-ways before you know when is the right time to say yes and when to say no. A friend of mine when i was feeling so awful from fatigue & I felt like i was letting people down told me – you gotta say no if you really want to say yes.

Would i have ever wanted to go straight into healthcare from school? The answer would have been hell-naw. I didn’t have the empathy. I didn’t have the experiences I have now. I needed to experience the hardship to gain the drive.

So even though the long, hard, stupid way is just that, what it produces is something cool. When we work this way, it sort of gains an empheral quality. It’s sort of in the air – everything always feels up in the air. Whenever we make things this way – either for ourselves or for other people. There’s some kind of value in that. And that value exists outside of commericalization or money. And I love that. It sort of becomes a gift.

The thing with gifts is that – you have to be given a gift. You can’t ask for one. The more a gift moves, the more value it gains (has it been passed on through the family, does it fill a gap – a representation of a bond, is it using someones time) — like wise – the more work you put into something – the more value is gained. Ultimately a gift is a sacrifice.

Essentially the best work I do is when I say something or do something or give something , to really help people (in every/any way), or to people I really care about.

But the biggest potential is that – Doing things the long, hard, stupid way – you learn all sorts (mostly wrong things) – but you get a gift. Or you create a gift for others.

It’s that you can build a foundation or something for people. My practice is driven by my belief in making things for other people. Whether that’s making time to listen and to help, making something to make people think, making something that will better their experience, making something that brings people together, to make someone laugh or feel heard. By making something for other people, by considering someone else it moves the edges of our beings closer together and we gain more overlap in the process.

And we should look at these overlaps, to talk to each other. to know what we all have in common and to create more situations to create more commonalities. And by doing this we can some how grasp the wonder that is so hard to grasp – of what lies in the heart of making – and making things the long, hard, stupid way.

And when I think about all the awful things this government is doing and pushing through – from ruining the NHS, and demoralizing Junior Doctors, to entrenching a future generation in 50,000 + debt for education, to cruel benefit changes, to making students criminals if they can’t pay back their student loan immediately after they’ve finished university, to trying to get rid of our human rights, to airstriking syria, to stopping free dinners for children who can’t afford to eat. It makes me so, so, so angry. And even helpless.

But the long, hard, stupid way is all about continuing to try, push and make something – we don’t care about barriers – or the challenges – or even the outcome: the gift that comes out of making things for others shows and says for us to stop, look and look around us. It says everything is possible again. And the world isn’t yet done.

If we can find the courage, and the strength to make things (whatever that is) for others, we can give these gifts back to one another. There’s so much more what unites us than what separates us. People power goes a long way – even if its the long, hard, stupid way.

“If you change the way you look at things, the things that you look at change.” — Max Planck

I’ve written about it endlessly before, but I feel like I’m living a new – unexpected – even unwanted version – of my life. i’ve endured years and years of being in pain, delibertating symptoms and fatigue that made it so my old life didn’t fit the way it used to. My old life – and still does when I get close to mirroring it – drove me into the ground.

I love art. I love it with every fiber of my being. It was the thing that kept me awake all night, and i worked and worked and worked on this pure love of mine. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t really money viable – it didn’t matter that I kept 3 part-time jobs down as I jugged residencies and commissions, and writing endless proposals that would mostly get rejected. I loved it. I loved the potential for it to connect people, and ideas, and potentially make a change. Make a difference. I could never see a future for myself where art wasn’t in it. It’s still the thing that helped me keep a part of my self through the big change.

Unfortunately this tidal wave came begging to tear down my dawn, and made me struggle against it, made me choke on salt water. And it changed how i saw the world. I took a bit of a different direction — but I told myself, it would be with art too. But it was hard to see a future when I wasn’t sure if I was going to have one.

Trying to be arty and creative in healthcare is hardwork. Some people are suspicious of your enthusiasm, suspicious of your motivation – they don’t really understand you. Some people just don’t get it. Some people are amazingly visionary and creative and risk-taking too – and super supportive which excites me and I’m endlessly grateful for these people. But it’s hard. And my personal-art practice took a bit of a backseat in my eagerness to better the patient pathway.

I’ve been writing a proposal — another one that will probably be rejected – in true art form – but it’s reminded me of my old life again. Writing pretentiously yet beautifully philosophical sentences feels good for my soul. Writing emotively instead of just cold-facts – blunt, how do science people do it all the time? I can slowly feel the warmth coming back into my fingers and heart. I can feel parts of my brain working in a way that I’ve missed.

Conceptions of the body are not only central to medical anthropology, but also to the philosophical underpinnings of Being. Western assumptions about the mind and body, and the individual and society, affect both theoretical viewpoints and research paradigms. These same conceptions also influence ways in which health care is research and delivered in Western societies.

Foucault (1972, 1977, 1980, 1988) stated in his writings on biopower that medical technologies frame and focus healthcare professionals’ optical grasp of the patient, with the ‘medical gaze’ that abstracts the suffering person from her sociological context and reframes her as a “case” or a “condition”. Patients are seen as the voiceless, lost in a system that reduces them to their diagnoses, or not even that making the experience even worse, and often fails to understand their suffering. This is exemplified through my own experiences and was exactly the reason why I – the artist and experiencer – needed to change things.

Clinical biomedicine is the product of a Western epistemology. Healthcare professionals often struggle to view humans and the experience of illness and suffering from an integrated perspective, they often find themselves trapped by the Cartesian legacy. This lacks a precise vocabulary with which to deal with mind-body-society interactions, resulting in the disconnectedness of care throughout a patients’ pathway and beyond.

In writing this, I realised just how disconnected I had become from my own art practice — the person I was – and my experiences. I had to go through archives of old websites to remind myself on what I did in my art years for this application; the time before I fell sick, before I committed most of my energy to healthcare. It just seems like a distant memory now. And I was shocked.

It was like in a movie when someone discovered old, worn-yellowed newspapers of events they couldn’t believe happened. Here existed an amazing list of my achievements, that I had forgotten all about. The pain had erased them. Struggling to survive, and get through each day had taken its toll upon me. I had literally forgotten what had made me who I am. The crazy thing is, I struggled and worked so hard to achieve all of this. And it had disappeared as quickly as my old life had been taken. What amazed me more was how this was pre-bucketlist. I have since, began to tick a few of my other goals of my past life off, unknowingly. And I have achieved a bunch of stuff that became more important. (It’s als important to note – i’ve been drawing loads & getting paid as an artist/illustrator – it’s just not the same stuff)

But as my radiotherapy studying chapter is coming to a close, I’m starting to feel the eagerness to reconnect with my old life – despite still having all the issues that made me change my life direction in the first place. And it’s confusing.

“We must be willing to let go of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” — Joseph Campbell.

I let go of the life I had planned, but the life that is waiting for me is unclear. I’m unsure what to do, where to go next. Healthcare doesn’t fully accept me for me, but art doesn’t either. It has so much commodity and rewards so much self-absorbed-ness . Life is precious and there’s suffering – which art can help aid – but the Artworld doesn’t understand what I’ve been through, and felt, and why healthcare needs to be changed so others don’t have that experience.

But who will accept me? And why have I written this? Well, if finding my old resumes and pieces of my old life dotted around like dusty digital footprints has taught me anything today – is that we should be archiving our lives, our work, just incase we do forget what we’ve done. If we forget who we are, or who we were.

And I also know that there’s people like me out there. This here serves as a reminder for future Smizz – who will probably be doing something else completely insane – like a career in maths or something else I can’t do. And for anyone else going through a hard time.

You gotta swim, swim for the music that saves you when you’re not so sure you’ll survive. And swim when it hurts. The whole world is watching – and you’ve haven’t come this far to fall off the earth. Currents will pull you away from your love – just keep our heads above the water. Memories are like bullets and fire at you from a gun. We all get cracks in our armour – but don’t give in. Sometimes the nights won’t end. But you gotta swim for your families, your sisters, your brothers, your friends. You gotta get past wars without cause, past the lost politicians who don’t see their greed as a flaw. You gotta swim in the dark, there’s no shame in drifting, feel the tide shifting away from the spark. You gotta swim, don’t let yourself sink – you’ll find the horizon, please believe me – I promise you it’s not as far away as you think.

The current’s will always try and drag you away from your love- just keep your head above the water and swim.

Art is part of my being. It’s what makes me tick. It’s what makes me feel truly happy. But I also know I can’t let inequalities, and issues that exist that I know can be fixed – happen without any input.

So even though I had forgotten 80% of my art life. I’m going to put it down to trauma. I don’t necessarily think people are born as artists, but they certainly die as artists. I’m always going to be an artist – even if I lose my footing a bit. And I look forward to building more goals to combine art and suffering into better change.

I am hoping for 2016 to be a year where we open the doors wider and take care of each another

Susan Sontag wrote in her “Illness as metaphor” (1978) essay ,

“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. “

I’ve found myself asking myself, “Smizz, how do you get from here to there? ” I’ve spent the last few years trying to find my way back to the kingdom of the well. 2015 was all about screwing up maps, getting really, really lost. Like I’ve been using Bing maps instead of google maps. I feel like my good-healthy passport needs renewing.

I get good days, even weeks, only to be knocked down by by more complications, more intense symptoms. Life wasn’t going my way, but that’s something I’ve been learning to get used to and it happens to us all. I definitely cope better now, but what I can’t get used to is the feeling of being broken.

And what’s scary is that most of this is happening to us all, in some shape or form: depression, low-self-esteem, a loved one being sick, unemployment, abuse, bullying, war. ect. At some point, we all loose our footing. And in the wake of trauma, sure footing can be hard to find.

When all this started, and I thought I was going to loose my life, I was full of regret.

I had a good life – But why did I spend so much time on Facebook ? There was so much more I wanted to do, places I was worried I was never going to see. I always wanted to have a border collie puppy. I always wanted to own an american fridge with an ice maker (not sure why, I don’t even like ice in my drinks). But here i was thinking I’d never have any of that. And what about my artwork, my art-life? I had dedicated nearly 7 years of my life to what I was doing. And I had left it behind, without saying a word to most people except close friends.

I wrote a will. I settled my affairs – they told me to. And i was terrified because I’m an artist – and i was seeing a future where if I go blind, I might not get to do my work anymore.

But I’m alive. I’m alive! And I’ve learnt that there’s a big difference between surviving and living.

So in 2013, I was slumped over with fatigue. I barely got out of bed. But what I do realized then was that I couldn’t just keep living my same oldlife anymore because it just didn’t fit anymore. The stakes had changed. My life view was flipped. All that stuff i thought was important, turned out not to be that important.

In 5 months time, I HOPEFULLY will be a qualified radiotherapist. I’ve spent the past 2 years being pulled through my course by my amazing friends and family whilst managing horrible, horrible side-effects/symptoms?. I will be qualified to deliver radiotherapy treatments, create treatment plans, innovate and care for my patients and their carers going through the cancer pathway. And I’m super excited and shit-scared. I took on this course for a number of reasons: One was to help me cope & have some understanding of the human body, and genetics and control, 2 was to give back to the NHS and to emulate the great care I was given & to irradicate the poor care I saw too. But ultimately it was to help make the difference I want to see, to make the pathway better for others. To enhance and help empower patients and their carers narratives. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learnt is when you’re sick – you feel vulnerable and voiceless.

If you asked me 5 years ago if I saw myself here – the answer would have been – what’s radiotherapy? And errr nO?! If you asked me at the beginning of my course if I would be in 3rd year now, I wouldn’t have been so sure. But now here i am, trying to adapt healthcare research with creative methodologies.

l’ve experienced chronic pain and fatigue. I realized how debilitating it can be, and how rarely we take the time to understand it in others. But this lesson is still being learnt. The experience is humbling and, more than anything, made me much more aware of – and empathetic to – the hurt that we ignore.

This, in particular, is my motivation going into 2016. My resolution (although I hate the word “resolution”; it sounds flimsy and self-obsessed) is to take more time recognizing the pain in others and offering solace whenever possible. I aim to keep the dialogue open with all of you, whether online or in-person. I want us to be open, and warm, even in the face of the unknown. Always believe you can change the world – even if it’s only a tiny bit, because every tiny bit needed someone who changed it – and one person CAN change the world.

2016 maybe full of joy for you. It maybe full of challenges. It’ll probably be full of both. However it all plays out, remember that we have each other. Don’t wait to be asked for help; you’re already being beckoned.

I started 2015 feeling lost in transition, the pain was really, really grinding me down. I cried like twice on clinical placement because I felt behind & that I’ve got a lot to loose, I gave up my art life. There’s no roadmap to picking up the pieces of a broken life. So I’ve been drawing my own roadmap, and somewhere along the way, I’ve started to feel like I’m living again with the help of all of YOU – my friends. I’ve visited 5 new countries this year. I chased the Northern Lights with my friends, we rode under Niagra Falls, we drank thrugh the worst icelandic storm of 30 years. And as I have watched the ocean many times this year, it reminded that the suns set, but it will rise again and everything keeps moving. But we don’t get forever. And that’s ok. We just have to make sure the stuff that counts, really fucking counts.

I hope that 2016 will hopefully bring me some more closure, and I’m hoping for less headahce, much less fatigue, more adventures, taking more photographs, seeing friends, better email action, laughter, fun, love and hope. And finishing & passing my degree without a nervous breakdown (lol) . And hopefully a job offer, if I’m lucky. You never know what the road has planned though.

So each year I do my top 10 movies. 2015 has been a great year for females. So many strong female-led movies. And it’s about time!

I love going to the movies, i love the anticipation of waiting to see a movie. However, this year I didn’t get much opportunity to see as many arthouse flicks as I would have liked, and this top 10 list reflects that. Now, each movie in my top 10 has a place – for it’s individual reason. So it might not be the *GREATEST* movie of the year, but it certainly achieved something for me in an area such as character development, or dialogue, or cinematography. ect. Sooo wasting no more time.

10.) Mad Max: Fury Road. Unhinged, high-octane vehicular mayhem. A tough-as-nails postapocalyptic feminist heroine bitingly portrayed by Charlize Theron. (And hey, Tom Hardy was pretty good too as the titular hero.) A crazed ride into a monumental, lightning-etched storm with the pedal all the way to the metal while a war boy howls “Oh, what a day … what a lovely day!” Unforgettable movie moments are made of this. And to think the picture was made by a director in his late 60s. George Miller, you are the (aged) man for the ages.

9.) Carol. A breath-takingly beautiful cinematic journey of a forbidden love. Filmed as if an Edward Hopper painting had sprung to life, its mood washes over you in an evocative mix of opulence and despair as it dizzyingly dances with the forbidden. Some of the best scenes are filmed from the perspective of a person looking through a car window. 2015’s best romance.

8.) Tangerine. This movie feels the most 2015. Shot entirely on iPhones and with a budget that wouldn’t cover cab fares on a blockbuster, Sean S. Baker’s indie dramedy makes virtue of necessity. Compelling filmmaking, too, in this Sundance sensation about transgendered sex workers, a pimp, cabbie and angry mother-in-law in lowdown L.A. Doing whatever it takes to make the invisible, visible.

7.) JOY: Joy can be viewed as a modern day rags-to-riches fairytale. It’s Cinderella without the prince. In a way, that’s part of the film’s charm. Sure, there’s preposterous dialogue, but there are also so many electric sequences that made me lean in, smile, & care about a mop. It does give hope showing that no matter how one does struggle in life miracles of success are possible, so don’t read all the bad reviews and assume otherwise.

6.) Steve Jobs. Side-stepping arguements about the accuracy of the biopic, the real achievement here is making cinema out of material that isn’t even a stage play as much as very expensive radio: a battery of dialogue, unbroken by reflective pauses or even, on occasion, the actors drawing breath. The staginess of the movie is its greatest benefit, allowing the characters and the dialogue to shine. Boyle, however, is not a director to be contained in dry rooms, and he allows this theatrical drama to move, via music and editing, into the realm of real cinema. It may be stagey, but make no mistake, it crackles and moves like a motherfucker.

5.) Spy. Now i love a good comedy, but great comedies are hard to come by these days – and I feel like there’s less and less comedies being made due to their hard task. Spy makes making seemless comedies look super easy to make. Feig keeps his Spy machinery cranking so smoothly that nothing said or done feels as outrageous as, in fact, it is. McCarthy is the star of the film, but her willingness to let her fellow actors shine when an opportunity knocks to give the audience a belly-laugh is clear, and it’s the undeniable strength of the supporting cast that makes Spy a strong a film.

4.) AMY. I was taken aback by how well an thoughtful this documentary was made. Watching Kapadia’s film, it is possible to see how badly she was let down by the male figures closest to her. it’s the music that suddenly feels monumental because somewhere in that dark stream of rolling notes and rumbling minors, we can hear the eternal soul of human sadness turned, for a brief moment, into something undeniably beautiful.

3.) Inside Out. It’s an emotional rollercoaster, and it’s one of pixar’s finest. It takes a long walk down an infinite pier of personal identity in, an animated tour of developmental psychology that captures the pain of growing up using primary colours and Amy Poehler’s voice. As for visual style, it’s dazzling, flouting CGI’s tendency to photorealism in favour of overt cartoonishness in a 1950s retro vein, together with a refined exploration of light: the emotions are composed of fibrous bundles of luminescence.

2.) 45 Years. An inner drama, taking place inside the characters. There are no heroes or villains in this film. Shot with loving attention to the silent vistas of the English countryside, 45 Years conveys a sense of isolation, of two people being together yet growing apart, a dream that has been shattered, and a lifetime of security undermined by a moment of doubt. It is a thorny subject but beautifully told with gentleness and love. Plus 2 outstounding performances.

1.) The Martian. I actually can’t stop thinking about this movie. A fan of the book, I wasn’t sure how the motion picture would compare, and indeed make the main character-likeable. But yeah, there’s flaws. But there was something about The Martian that captured the 12 year old in me. Damon makes the most of this “me time”, engaging our interest, winning our sympathy and teasing our anxieties about his perilous predicament. Whilst the most surprisingly element about this movie was the screenplay. What makes the movie unique to me was Watney’s optimistic point of view. He believes that he isn’t going to die on Mars, and this transforms this rather depressing situation into something comical instead, engaging us with many self-help survivalist discoveries. But when you really think about it, this is a very personal film about some people coming together to save somebody. That’s it. And in today’s world, it’s nice to hear an story about people coming together to save one of their own. It might take all the romance out of Mars, but substitutes in its place science, cooperation, and human perseverance. PS: You should read the book too – and check out the author’s videos on how everything is correct including the astrophysics!

It’s kind of exciting not really fitting into pigeon holes. They say I’m a Smizz of all trades, master of none. I’m currently designing and coding an app in my (limited) spare time, which I hope will help to aid patients in having a better patient-centered-care experience. The app hopes to include all the information for their treatment, and later on become interactive- enabling the patient to get the support they really need (financial, emotional, physical, ect) by using a series of questions over a period of time, and documenting how they’re coping/feeling/side-effects, ect. It’s exciting stuff. But learning coding for this is a steep learning curve.

As an intermediate dabbler in website designing and coding, and now embarking on objective-C and swift codes I am no stranger to being able to take a problem and see the inevitable solutions, but also I’m pretty skilled now in being able to hypotheize the potential for disaster – what problems could I run into using a certain code with another, or ethically, or in language, ect. We use this kind of thinking in Healthcare too. It’s figuring out what our best practice is by eliminating all the problems for optimal experience and outcomes. In art, we use these problems too, to breakdown into manageable truths. As a Marxist, I’ve naturally developed a somewhat cynical ability to breakdown systems really easily into oppressive segregations & loopholes & weaknesses.

But thinking like this naturally, or often, comes with its consequences. Your every day problems become disastrous in your mind. I catch myself getting caught up in this mind-set – Unanswered phone calls become bad-news, someone being late becomes a car accident, late arrivals due to delayed trains and buses become missed opportunities. Being poorly and not doing as much as I used to became career stagnation. The omnipresent of ‘but-what-ifs’ continue to grow.

However, now I try and use this unconscious worst-case-scenario as a way to panic myself into action. Rewards come from risk, and a life without risk is a life that’s probably pretty boring.

When I arrived in the land of the ill – i wasn’t sure i was going to survive. It was the worst I’ve ever felt in my life. I made a list of all the things I’d do if I ever recovered. If I got a second chance. I mean, yeah, i had led a pretty interesting life up to that moment, but I had made sacrifices in the present for a future which I had no idea I’d ever get, as we all do. As a patient, I often felt misunderstood. I was demeaned within the healthcare system 1 or 2 times. I felt ashamed for being poorly. (As well as being shown amazing compassion). I could see levels of the system that I knew I could instantly change if I was in the system (such as just simplying listening to the patient, making them feel heard). I also ferociously read everything i could on cancer, & healthcare and compassion. The experience made me want to be the change I so desperately wanted to see as a Patient. I thought, mane, this system needs some more creative/different thinkers! I have this habit of trying to game systems. So when I started to get back onto my feet a little bit, or learning to live with what was happening, I began to realize some of those things on my list. After talking to a lot of people, I realized the potential possibilities so I applied & started my healthcare adventure.

Being told that it looks like you have a malignancy forces you to realize that life can end literally any time. And this quickly changes what you deem worthy of your attention. I was furious at myself for not being as present with friends and family as I should have been. All the nights-out I missed at university, all the times I wasn’t empathetic to my housemate for his anxiety with post-graduation life. I was absolutely Furious! These were things I hadn’t even calculated in my head until I got ill.

The junction between mortality and mundanity is an exquisite source of perspective. I often sit on the bus, watch a sunset and I think about how these boundaries between are treacherous and illusory. It’s hard to gain this kind of perspective, and it’s equally hard not to lose it, not to start slipping back into old habits. Partially for that reason, I enrolled onto my radiation oncology course. I love art, and it makes me happy and fulfils my soul. But I do miss the way people think in art, and the discussions and dialogues when I’m working in healthcare. I miss the playfulness of the every day I had when I was a fulltime artist – but I believe there’s somewhere in between for both areas.

Art makes me the person who doesn’t trust everything I am taught in the healthcare system. Art is the reason why I can understand and empathize with a persons story, with the person and not just the disease that we’re treating. Healthcare makes me appreciate the edges of life, the possibilities, the beauty & tragedy in it. Designing something brings these 2 worlds together for me.

But coding has taught me about action. This is extremely important right now. We are standing in the middle of time, where great injustices go untouched. Architects of the financial melt down continue to swoon with the governments. & yet our laws and governments continue to value capitalism over humanity. Under-funding the NHS, profiting from education, trying to put laws into place to criminalize our movements when we try and mobilise against things that are wrong, cutting funding for those who are in great need of it, where we give up our freedoms, and allow ourselves to be spied on by the NSA, ect all under the guise of protection.

Change doesn’t roll in on inevitability, it comes with continuous struggle.

So, just as I promised my bleeding, puking, bruised former-self, I plan on raging against the bullshit, and make things that can help others, and keep the door open with kindess & listen. I will wander for a while: call this just 1 of many future sabbaticals. Life isn’t linear. Neither is coding, making, changing. In the end, I think my job over-all isn’t healthcare student, nor artist – but to remind myself every day that my time is limited. And so is yours.

As Aaron Swarts used to say, “What is the most important thing you could be working on right now? And if you’re not working on that, why aren’t you?”